More Illegal Immigrants Detained Indefinitely at Greater Expense To Tax Payers

As it turns out indefinitely jailing immigrants, is not only questionable from a civil rights perspective, but also costly to tax payers.

With an increased emphasis on enforcement nationally and an un-equal focus on creating infrastructure to  process the removal of illegal immigrants, detention centers are filling up at an alarming rate.

Jeremy Redmon of The Atlanta Journal Constitution has the full story in his article Growing illegal immigration Backlog In Court More detained indefinitely at Greater Expense.

Immigrants suspected of being in the United States illegally are being held in a detention center in southwest Georgia for months at taxpayer expense, and others remain free on bond for years here amid a severe backlog in the nation’s immigration courts, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has learned.

While the example above is Atlanta specific, the lack of judges available to process immigration related cases is a national problem:

The nationwide court backlog is documented in a recent study by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research organization that monitors the federal government. The study says the number of pending cases in Georgia reached an all-time high of 7,046 this summer. The vast majority of those were deportation cases. Nationwide, there were 247,922 immigration cases pending as of June 21, another all-time high. Georgia ranks 10th among states based on its pending caseload.

In Atlanta, it takes more than a year to process one deportation case, this creates costs on the back end for tax payers who have to pay for immigrants to be detained indefinitely:

Atlanta’s immigration court is so flooded with deportation cases that it takes more than a year — 450 days — to resolve one on average. Cases for inmates at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin are pending for 63 days on average.

Meanwhile, it costs taxpayers $60.50 a day on average to house an inmate at the Stewart County facility. As of Sept. 17, the center was holding 1,890 inmates. That works out to a daily cost of $114,345, based on the average expense.

Basing the success of immigration enforcement on the metric of arrests listed above, by all accounts the administrations current posture, has been a success.

At this point, perhaps it is time to concentrate on creating the infrastructure necessary to not only process the huge numbers of immigrants in detention centers, but also create a system to allow those who want to come to work and then leave.